Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we'll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP. Despite this issue being known about for a long time, basic Linux tools for partitioning and formatting drives have not caught up.

Yeah, Mandriva would certainly fall within the category of distros which should sort all of this stuff out automatically without the user having to worry. Distros like Arch, Gentoo & Slackware all generally expect their users to be aware of the technical issues. But for the mainstream distros this does need to be fixed.

Maybe we could take a look at our respective distros and file a bug report if there could be an issue.